Is Social Security fair? Ask the Brady Bunch

Social Security is a progressive system that usually pays middle- and lower-income workers a higher return on their contributions to the system than it pays to the highest earners. And if you don’t believe me, just ask Cindy Brady—the pigtailed baby of the family in the loved-by-many, mocked-by-more 1970s sitcom “The Brady Bunch.”

“It’s a story…of a tax called FICA…”

Cindy is the putative number-cruncher whose analysis is featured in “Is Social Security Regressive?,” a spoonful-of-pop-culture-sugar study released this week by analysts Jim Kessler and David Brown of the centrist political think tank Third Way. The paper aims to rebut the argument that richer Americans get a sweetheart deal from Social Security because their payroll taxes are capped at a level far lower than their total income (currently $113,700)—a theme that has emerged during ongoing debates over how to keep the program solvent.

To make this argument more—colorful? palatable? Hollywood-friendly?—Kessler and Brown couch it in a tale involving the grown-up Brady kids—now edging gradually into their 50s. The premise: Marcia, now the highest-earning and most successful of the stepsiblings, asks Cindy – a “math savant” – to do some calculations that compare Marcia’s Social Security contributions and likely withdrawals to those of her stepbrothers Greg and Peter. Conveniently enough, Marcia (an architect) earns exactly twice as much as middle-class Greg (an assistant at Marcia’s architecture firm), and four times as much as working-class Peter (a butcher).

Cindy runs four scenarios, and her conclusions generate two cheers for the status quo: In all of the scenarios, Peter sees the best return on investment on his contributions, Greg the second-best, and Marcia the worst, and this remains true even in scenarios where Peter dies relatively young or retires relatively early (both things that working-class people are more likely to do).

But while the math looks sound, the arcs of the Brady characters as portrayed by Kessler and Brown may come as a surprise to anyone who kept up with the surprisingly numerous sequels that appeared between 1976 and 1990, as the Brady kids navigated adulthood. For those who aren’t Brady cognoscenti (and, full disclosure, neither am I), here are some of the salient points that emerge when comparing Kessler and Brown’s report to TV “reality”:

First of all, congratulations to Cindy for honing her math skills. When last seen in the 1990 sequel “The Bradys,” she was working at radio station and dating her much-older boss, neither of which seemed a promising life path. Actuary, on the other hand, has recently been ranked in at least one survey as the best job in America, and Cindy apparently now has the skills to land that kind of gig.

In “The Bradys,” Greg was an obstetrician, while Marcia was a stay-at-home mom struggling with alcoholism. Clearly, there’s been a reversal of fortune for each in the ensuing decades, but that fact doesn’t appear to have been included in Cindy’s analysis. Could Greg’s earlier, higher-earning years mean bigger checks when he retires?

As teenagers in the 1970s, the actors playing Greg and Marcia were romantically involved, as both have subsequently acknowledged. As long as we’re blurring fiction and reality, I’ve got to ask: Is it really healthy for those two to be working together at the architecture firm, sharing long nights over their CAD workstations and maquettes? I fear a scandal.

What do the authors have against Jan? Kessler and Brown have little to say about her—so little, in fact, that in the paper’s preamble, one that involves Marcia arguing with “her sister,” they appear to be unable to remember her name.

In later Brady sequels, Mike, the Brady patriarch, wins election to the city council. But Kessler and Brown reveal that the Bradys never contributed to Social Security on behalf of Alice, their loyal housekeeper. Scandals like that have been stumbling blocks for many a promising politico. Will Mike’s career survive? Stay tuned for…well, I guess for the next Third Way policy paper.

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